


Paradise

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (but not for long), Canon Divergent, Disaster Virgins, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Introspective Convos + Banging, Political Shenanigans, Slow Burn, TROS-Fix It, Unresolved Sexual Tension, background Finn/Rose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:21:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22606183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: For two people whose souls are inseparably united, the question of sex shouldn't be that complicated. Given Ben and Rey's individual histories, however, it really comes as no surprise.But that's all right. They’ll have their whole lives together to figure it out, if Rey and Ben and possibly several hundred generations’ worth of Jedi ghosts have anything to say about the matter.Which they do.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 98
Kudos: 552
Collections: For one is both and both are one in love: The Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's Valentine's Day Exchange





	Paradise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bittersnake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittersnake/gifts).



> My prompt (and what a delightful prompt - thank you) was as follows: 
> 
> "Post-TROS, somehow Ben is alive (HOW IS UP TO YOU). Rey is ready to bang, Ben....needs advice. Please I just want a force ghost chorus giving these two disaster virgins advice. Bonus if you include the Resistance as well."
> 
> I appreciated the encouragement to follow the spirit of the prompt, rather than the letter, but I promise the Force Ghost Chorus does make its appearance.

…

Most of what Rey learns about sexual intercourse between the ages of twelve and twenty-one comes from chaperoning the happabores at mating season. 

The drovers in Niima Outpost pay her five credits per day to sit on the paddock fence armed with a muck-rake and administer a few scolding wallops whenever one of the bulls proposes to conduct himself in a manner ill-befitting a gentleman, which given the boisterous and flamboyant courtship rituals of the common two-tusked desert happabore is a fairly frequent occurrence. Rey can never decide whether it is the bull or the cow that makes itself look funnier but finds it endearing nonetheless that they are both so very willing to look funny together as a pair. 

Still, it is easy money, so long as she can avoid getting trampled, and since Plutt pays her in portions it is also the only time of year she can actually afford anything; Rey once squanders her whole money-purse on a bushel of tuanulberries and it stains her mouth blue for a week. 

The remainder of her education is provisioned from five flimsiback romance novels lining a shelf in the mercantile store, which houses the outpost’s only interstellar radio and serves grease-fried hot chuba sandwiches at midday. The storekeeper uses these books to deliver unpaid meal tabs in, so that their pages are scrawled with arithmetical calculations, gastric critiques concerning the menu, signatures in two dozen different languages and obscene doodles of the reproductive organs from two dozen different species. 

Rey examines all five books but reads only one, scrunched behind the lunch counter or while scrubbing dishes in exchange for the honor of first licking them clean. The books each have titillating if somewhat opaque titles: _Under the Blue Moons of Bellassa, Wild Nights on_ _Chandrila, Ravishing the Scoundrel, The Dark Prince of House Sizhran,_ and one older novel called _First Impressions_ that is, in fact, printed on real paper, not flimsi, which lends it a smell and a texture and a dusty, melancholy warmth the others do not possess. The man and woman in this story do a lot of talking with one another, and nothing gets blown up or shot, but the things the man says are so pretty and so overwhelming in their prettiness— half his words are in a language Rey does not speak, but even these are pretty; min larel, valle larel, turhaya — that she halts several times to squeeze the book against those new rose-hip breasts she keeps bound flat beneath her clothes. 

The book’s final twenty pages have been ripped out at the spine and Rey must ask the storekeeper if he can tell her how it ends.

“But what about Darius?” the storekeeper is busy sweeping; Rey dodges around the almost-clean swatches on the floor as she follows him. “He was still sick with Idolian fever, in the part I was at. Does Lady Elsapeth find him in time?”

The man smacks his broom down twice to jar off the dust. It coats the lunch stools, the display cases, the row of mismatched caf cups hung on pegs and a bouquet of pink Nabooian parade flowers made from crystal, which is priced at eight thousand credits and serves no purpose except its beauty and has therefore sat on the store’s shelf untouched for ten years. 

“Everybody knows that story, girl,” the storekeeper laughs. “He dies.” 

Rey takes the book back into the store’s galley kitchen and drowns it elbow-deep in a gravy pot of sudsy water. 

On occasion she will sit atop the AT-AT to practice kissing, or what she imagines kissing to be, bestowing her maidenly favors upon the translucent darkness of the desert night and pondering where the noses are supposed to go. She lies in a hammock her body has long since outgrown and pretends her arms belong to someone else while she folds them around herself. She wakes from an unpleasant dream one morning when she is thirteen – she recalls only a slim blaze of green light; in another instant this is gone, too – to find a swash of scarlet blood between her thighs, and she spends all day composing a farewell letter to her family while she awaits her agonizing demise. She bequeaths the Rebel pilot’s helmet to her father and the ragdoll to her mother, whatever their respective real names might turn out to be. 

And if I’ve got any brothers or sisters by now, Rey remembers to add, tell them they can keep my staff. It’s good for whacking things. 

When she is still alive by the next day, however, sticky and slimy and cinched at the middle from pain, Rey consults a human woman who does the local saloon’s bartending and accounting. She charges Rey five saved-up credits in trade for some illuminating insight. 

“I don’t believe you.” Rey studies a roll of sterile gauze the woman has given her. “That’s really how it happens?”

“Believe it or not if you like, but it’s the truth.” The woman keeps a long rosewood pipe jammed in her mouth. She wears five skirts at once, all varying colors that churn and slash whenever she dances atop the bar or kicks somebody in the teeth. “Then the man you’ve lain down with sticks the thing he’s got between his legs inside the not-thing you’ve got between yours and you both flop around like a pair of buttered Sedrian seals – if it works, you get real fat and weepy over everything and sooner or later the hapless little snot-bag you’ve made puts in its premiere appearance.” 

Rey frowns. 

She has thought several times before about the mechanics of obtaining a baby, and has already surmised that she probably has more in common with the happabore cows than the ripper-raptor lizards or the steel-pecker birds, but these new particulars present an added complication; she has no idea how a woman can have a baby if the man has squashed her flat first, which seems the inevitable result of lying down with any of the unwashed, unkempt, unrepentant human male specimens in Rey’s current limited acquaintanceship. 

“I see,” she says. “How long’s the man got to leave it in for?” 

“Depends on the man.” The woman blows a curlicue of smoke. “Aren’t you too grown-up to be asking stupid questions like this?”

Rey leaves by way of the saloon’s back door and must sneak to the public watering hole before daybreak so she can scrub the blood from her sheets; it takes her several tries and for months afterwards they bear a faint, wide blossom at their center. 

She also tears her half-written farewell letter into pieces and burns it in a fire she kindles to life from some spinebarrel branches and tinder. The gray ashes fly up atop a pillar of withering heat and are borne away into the vast, empty distance. 

…

The first heralding presentiment Ben ever has regarding the general concept of sex comes from watching his parents say goodbye to one another. 

It always happens in the same way; one of them will turn back, abruptly, after a courteous and formal parting, as though realizing just before a door swings shut that they have forgotten to lock it safe behind them. They will put their arms around one another, press their lips as close together as seems possible given the limitations of physical form, and this moment will embroider the air with such a private ecstasy of pleasure and regret that Ben must close his eyes against it. 

He figures this mushy-face business likely shares some dim connection with whatever happens at night when Mom or Dad comes home again, as well. Ben will sit in his bedroom closet with his hands on his knees – he likes it inside the dark, contained space, his back against the wall – to contemplate what sort of nonsense his parents could possibly be getting up to at two o’clock in the morning; it makes a lot of strange noises and Ben wonders if maybe they are tickling one another. Or wrestling. 

It is difficult to decide.

This quandary is at last laid bare for him one day when he comes across a coy euphemism in a line of Old Corellian poetry. He translates the passage three times, three different ways, chin balanced on his fist in concentration while he chews the end of his calligraphy pen, and finally consults the footnote:

 _In a characteristic show of subversion,_ the note reads, _the anonymous Eharl Khoehng poet here employs the classical if sophomoric imagery of the phallic “saber” and the vaginal “hilt” to illustrate the consummation of the unnamed narrator’s passion, yet the placement of the caesuras and the anapestic tetrameter would suggest we are in fact meant to see the “bright star” of the kyber crystal, the heart of the saber, as the actual feminine element in –_

Ben scoots off his chair and hunts up a dictionary, which he requires a stool to retrieve from its highest shelf in Mom’s office; this definition further calls for a holobook on human anatomy and physiology Ben keeps atop his writing desk. He enjoys how the book’s different colors and dispassionate scientific labels make all his squirmy, squelchy, dirty insides – he is almost ten years old and should not, not, not still be wetting his bed – seem so ordained and knowable. He wears down pairs of new shoes from the inside-out with all the writhing and fidgeting of his toes; he scratches at itches until there is blood beneath his nails and goes on scratching even so; he is bullied from his body by violent, ravaging tempers and cannot get back to himself in the aftermath, as though something bigger and stronger has taken his place. 

He reads the three selected texts alongside one another in an embarrassed sort of exegesis, hands over his pinked face while he peers through the keyhole created between his parted fingers. He decides he must apologize to his mother and father for having to do such a messy, unpleasant thing together, just so they could make him, and should probably apologize further for turning into such a messy, unpleasant person after all that hard work.

Unless they had not meant to make him, Ben allows. Maybe that messy, unpleasant thing from the book is supposed to feel nice, however improbable this may seem, and making him had just been A Big Mistake; the thought enters his head fully-formed and is therefore most likely correct. 

It would explain a few things, at least. 

The pained, contorting process that transmutes him from a boy into a man is one Ben observes as though from the outside, through the sharpening lens of a cynicism that demands he must laugh at his body’s vulgar, plaintive aches and hungers. Ben knows, of course, that he is being preserved for things far vaster, far greater, far more prized than whatever might be offered to him by those girls whose eyes deride him whenever they catch Ben staring — the summer-evening softness of dark hair, freckles scattered across shoulders and cheeks like the speckling on an orchid petal, small hands whose movements are as arch and powerful as wings – and then the temple burns; he runs; he rips away the garments of his former life and shrouds that filthy, hateful body in the cloak and the armor and the trailing black cerements as though to divorce his soul from the vulnerability of his own flesh because after all, who could want you, who could wish to know you as I know you and have known you from the start, who but I, I alone can guide and keep and love you in spite of all your foolishness and frailty? 

“No one, Master,” Ben answers, because he will never die to himself deeply or completely enough to stop being Ben, underneath. “Everything I am is yours.”

“My boy.” A long-nailed hand reaches out to hold his face. “We’ve always understood one another that way, haven’t we?”

…

The catalog of injuries he sustains on Exegol is so extensive it reads like a mythic creation story told in ironic reverse: ribs cracked, breath sucked from the punctured lung, liver lacerated and a right leg shattered at several contrary angles because it would seem he fell a second time in his first attempt to rise from the abyss. The medtechs burl his insides with a half-hundred polydioxanone stitches to bind off the bleeding vessels and Ben spends two days under a leaden weight of painkillers and sedatives, fed to him through an intravenous line in his left hand so that he will not erringly tear himself apart. 

“You did what?” one of the medtechs asks, when Rey drags him to them from the X-wing. “I don’t think I heard you right.” 

“He was dead,” Rey repeats, from the plateau of calm that sits somewhere just above panic and just below fury. “He died saving me and I brought him back to life.”

“You’re telling me this man was dead?”

“Was,” Rey says, “and if you don’t do something about that stomach bleed you’re going to learn a lot more about the ‘dead’ part than you’d likely care to.” 

Rey waits the two days by his bed and lifts cups of water for him to drink whenever Ben wakes and finds her there. While he sleeps she preoccupies herself with reading over datafiles confiscated from the First Order’s command ships, archived financial transactions passed through third-party shells and the names of every private shareholder in the Sienar-Jaemus Army Systems corporation; ten of these names belong to members of the New Republic Senate, or what remains of it. She takes scrapped pieces of flimsiplast and attempts to sketch Ben’s portrait — the terse brows over the deep-set eyes, the impulsive and vulnerable mouth, the nose as significant and chivalric as the stamp on a medallion — and is dissatisfied with all her attempts, although she does not erase any of them. Ben’s palms have been cut ragged by the sharp shale of the pit and Rey changes their bandages every eight hours, washes and dries them and puts them to her lips. 

Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber rests balanced across her thighs. 

Other times she simply sits to watch Ben’s sleeping face, his eyelids stirred by the shifting current of dreams Rey enters only briefly and always with a cautious, sickbed solicitude whenever she does. Inside one dream he is a small, small boy, curled in a berth aboard the Falcon while he listens to Dad snoring beside him and to the engines lulling around him. 

Rey puts a hand over the boy’s clenched little fist atop his covers; she is still holding this hand when she spools up her mind and gathers it back into her own head. 

“Just think,” she says. “All that drama about my not taking your hand and now you won’t be able to make me let it go.” 

When all other reserves fail at keeping her awake, which becomes a challenge somewhere past noon on the second day, Rey simply holds out her empty hands like a beggar and digs her fingernails into the palms. A pandemonium of contingencies and possibilities crowd her consciousness, more compelling and horrible than reassuring in their increasingly mundane improbability; he’ll pull out his stitches by accident and get an interstitial hemorrhage and won’t ask anybody for help, Rey thinks. Somebody will put poison in his food, in his water, under his skin with a long bright needle, someone will shoot him in the head or stab him in the heart. I’ll shut my eyes and go to sleep and when I wake up he will be dead and this time I will never, ever get him back. 

Ben twitches awake to blink through his lassitude at her. He works his numbed mouth around the words. 

“Rey?”

“Here I am.” Rey unknots her fingers; her nails have left livid quarter-moons in the skin. “You’re not hungry, are you? The mess hall’s got this machine that can make four different kinds of soup if you push a button — I don’t know how much more civilization can improve beyond that, do you?” 

He smiles. It shows the puckish crookedness of his teeth and seems as dear to her as a caress. 

On the third day, just after dawn, Poe clamps the intravenous line’s red stop-valve closed to present the New Republic’s instrument for unconditional surrender of the First Order.

Ben reads this document with a precise, persistent silence, interrupted only by the dove-wing rustle of a page whenever Rey turns one for him; his own hands are shaking too much to pinch the corners and he does not move or speak until Rey has reached the end – past articles demanding disarmament of the fleet, dissolution of the army, withdrawal from the colonies, deliverance of the high-commanding officers to trial and an oath to stand trial himself – where there is an empty space for him to sign in his absolute authority as the Supreme Leader. 

Ben looks up. 

“Am I allowed a request, General Dameron?”

Finn stands by the door with his fists shoved in his pockets. Poe leans forward against the metal-framed foot of Ben’s bed and folds his arms. 

“Which part of ‘unconditional’ do you need me to explain for you, exactly?”

“Unconditional surrender precludes the possibility of any guarantees made to the surrendering party,” Ben says, smoothly and all on one breath. “I’m not asking for a guarantee. You may honor or deny it at your discretion.”

“Great – the answer’s ‘no.’” 

Rey’s heart gives an angry leap. The air pressure drops as though with the precognition of a storm at sea. 

“Poe.”

She still has the final page in her left hand; the other is laid alongside Ben’s so that her smallest finger can rest over his. Poe’s eyes flicker, but whatever he sees in her face makes him turn his head away. 

“Fine,” he says. “How may we serve you, your supreme lordship?”

The pen they have given Ben has a retractable point and he tests it with his thumb. It leaves a splotch of red that articulates the labyrinthine twists of his fingerprint. 

“I would ask that the soldiers of the stormtrooper corps not be held accountable for their superiors’ actions,” Ben says. “Or for mine.” 

The glare slides from Poe’s face, a sheet of ice dislodging all in one piece. He does not seem certain what to replace it with. 

“And?”

“And if they choose,” Ben keeps his eyes level with Poe’s, “I ask that they be repatriated and aided by the New Republic Senate in returning to their home planets.” 

“What, that’s it?”

“Yes.” 

Poe glances over a shoulder at Finn, whose expression alters momentarily like the flash of a signal-lamp across a great distance. He nods, once. 

Poe turns again. 

“Yeah.” The tendons in his neck stand out when he grinds his teeth. “Sure. We can do that.”

“Thank you, General.”

Then Ben grips his right wrist in his left hand so that the course of the pen is held straight and signs his name on the apportioned line, Ben Skywalker Organa Solo. 

Poe stares at this signature for a very long time, seals the document with a roll of tamper-proof black adhesive tape and allows Finn to precede him out the door without once looking back at Rey. The vapor-lock hisses into its latch. Ben sags against the pillow when it does, his breathing rasped from the strain of keeping himself upright. 

Rey reaches to open the stop-valve on his intravenous line; Ben clasps her wrist. 

“Leave it. I don’t want any more.”

Rey lowers her hand, bearing his down along with it, and they sit there together atop the sustaining, suspending quiet of their separate contemplations.

After a while — there are no chronometers in this room, though there is a single high window on the wall behind the bed; Rey tracks time by the changing composition of the light — Ben’s breathing steadies. His eyes are blank with the vacancy of an exhausted mourner and the shaking in his hands has reached his mouth. 

“I made it up,” he says, at last. “It didn’t mean anything.” 

Rey bends an ear to him. Her hair is loose and fans across his pillow. “Made what up, Ben?”

“The name. Kylo Ren.” He turns his head to her. “I’d thought of it when I was a child.”

“Why?”

“Because I couldn’t —” he swallows thickly. “I didn’t think I could be everything they needed me to. I didn’t want to be — Snoke told me that was why a name I’d created for myself would be truer. I believed him.” He shuts his eyes and draws closer, so that he is speaking against the corner of her mouth; the tears on his face are transferred to hers by the contact. “I needed you to know that.” 

Rey feels the pain that sweeps from her heart down through her limbs, not certain whether it belongs to her or to him or whether it matters either way, and she is moving before she can properly envision what she wants to happen next. 

His eyes open when she presses her lips to the pulse at his temple. 

“Ben,” she says, and with her face still nuzzled in the crow-black waves of his hair she smiles. “Come on, let me hear you say it – Ben.”

“Ben,” he repeats, dry in his derision. 

“With feeling, now – Ben Solo.”

“Ben Skywalker Organa Solo.” He squinches his face while Rey wipes his tears with a tugged-down sleeve. “I’m fortunate my parents didn’t try fitting an homage to Chewbacca’s family in there somehow. His father went by ‘Itchy.’”

“I don’t know. It’s got a nice ring to it — yes, hello, I’m Rey None-of-Your-Business and this is the other half of my dyad in the Force, Ben Skywalker Organa Itchy Solo.” 

“Stop.” He tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. “You’ll make me rupture something if I laugh.”

“Well, if talking isn’t an option, there’s several alternatives I might suggest.”

“Enlighten me.” 

Her first kiss is to his mouth, soft and reticent in the inexpert but eager way she plucks his lips with hers. She drops another two kisses on his cheeks and traces a wayward course between the freckles and birthmarks on his face before ending at his lips again. Ben arches his neck to try and hold her there for longer; she flirts her head aside. 

“Wait your turn, Mister Solo. This is strictly for educational purposes.” She leans close again. “Show me where you’d like it next.”

Ben hesitates, staring up at her with his lips slightly parted, but manages to tap an unsteady finger against his right earlobe. 

Rey balances on her toes as she kilts a knee up onto the bed, bowing the sterile-coated mattress and bracing herself with her arms to either side of him so that she can kiss and nip at both his ears. She kisses the place he indicates on his neck, just behind his pulse, and opens his shirt at the very top to kiss the skin above his heart. Fresh bandages hold him braced about the middle and the bruises have turned yellowish around their edges.

He shivers. Rey pauses.

“Are you hurting?”

“If I were, it’d be no more than I’m used to.” He allows a weak laugh. “That tickles.”

Heat drums through her veins. She cannot touch him with any greater insistence than this, as delicately as though she is anointing his body — this big and broken, unbreakable body, this body she has wounded and scarred, this body whose life-force now sings through her marrow and quickens her blood — and Rey starts to laugh, too. 

She has not stopped laughing when she sees Ben’s face change, suddenly, and notes that she is crying at the same time. 

“Rey?”

“That’s me.” She sits back on the bed to press the heels of her hands against her eyes. “Sorry. Give me a minute.”

“What is it, Rey?”

Rey shakes her head.

She has heard them talking, of course, though they speak in hushed tones from behind corners where they expect Rey will not find them. She has seen it in the motion of their eyes, in the inflection of their speech and gestures, has found it seething and spitting in the minds of these noble, righteous-cause people she has lived with and fought beside for more than a year. 

Was it all for this, they say to one another. Was it all so that at the end, the very end, when his forces are broken and his throne is shattered and the mask is torn from his true face, was it all so that this spoiled child, this rabid cur, this monster, this thing could come crawling back to throw himself upon our expected mercy, were all our sacrifices made simply so that we might be refused the consolation and the triumph of watching him die?

And Rey recalls as well the puncture of meat and bone, as she ran him through with the flaming sword, recalls watching him stagger to fall placid and unprotesting at the feet of the woman who had just killed him. 

He had come back for her anyway. 

“Rey,” Ben says, again. 

“No.” She wipes her nose. “I’m not letting them take you from me.” 

“Who?”

“I don’t care who. Nobody. Anybody.” Tears put a brackish taste in her mouth. “I told you I’d help you turn, didn’t I? I meant it.”

“I know you did. I know.”

“I’ll make them understand,” she says. “I’ll tell them everything and they’ll realize it — it was Snoke. It was Palpatine. You were just a boy. It wasn’t fair.”

“Palpatine only asked me for the things he knew I was willing to give him.” 

“Don’t.” Her fingers drip. Her eyes welter under their lids. “We’ll run if we have to. I’ll take you somewhere and we’ll never come back.”

Ben lays his right hand on her knee, as gentle in its undemanding modesty as the touch of a bridegroom, and Rey very nearly shoves it away; it is the same gentleness that called him to die for her, the same gentleness for which she has no equal trade, the same gentleness that contains the whole unsearchable, awful enormity of his love. The hand itself had spanned the whole distance from her hip-bone to the notch below her sternum and Rey had woken with its heavy, steadying warmth against her. There is still a fleck of dried red ink on his thumb. 

“I wouldn’t ask that of you,” Ben says. “Not now.”

“But I’ll do it. Just watch me and see if I don’t.” Rey lifts his hand and holds it to her face. Her voice seems to overflow like a cup. “You’re not alone anymore, Ben.”

Ben eases his hand from hers; it grazes along her cheek, her neck, her shoulder down to her right arm and the burn scar there that looks like a barred spiral galaxy, or else like two reaching hands that have not quite yet touched. 

He strokes his thumb over it. 

“Neither are you.” 

...

The prison cell they give him on Chandrila is spacious and white and has no windows, which Ben regards as an advantage because it means he cannot look to see the ghosts of two generations floating there behind his reflection. The overhead lights go out at 2200 hours and turn on again at 600 hours. He is the entire southwest cell block’s only occupant and Rey is given a room at the opposite end of the compound, in the warden’s guest quarters; this is, in turn, about a mile from the newly-constructed Senate House, its plaster still damp enough to hold a handprint, where she goes each morning to haggle over the price of his life. 

I’ll fight them for him, Ben has heard her think. I’ll concoct some phony Jedi law about trial by combat and I’ll fight whoever they send against me and I’ll win, I’ll win, I’ll win, I’ll win. 

I have to. 

He tries to collect a store of benedictive calm within himself and decant it to her through the bond whenever she requires it; it is a tactic Ben deploys to the tune of uneven results and the only thing he is usually able to share with her is a borrowed, thorough fatigue. 

His own days are spent mostly in an interrogation room with a one-way mirror along the far wall and a door that opens from the outside. He speaks until his throat is dry; he provides the decryption codes for confidential communication logs, navigation charts, munitions factory blueprints, chemical weaponry research and dental records. He sits across the table from lieutenants and captains and generals of the Order while cross-examination questions are relayed to him from the room’s observation booth through a transmitter pinging in his ear. Ben concludes each interview with the same offer — a commuted sentence in exchange for a guilty plea, in exchange for aid; it is the only part of the dialogue he composes himself — and sits sedately still whenever an officer leans forward to call him a traitor. Some of them wail and gnash their teeth and hammer their fists against the walls. Some snivel and laugh and lie, lie, lie. Some bow their heads to bargain for the safety of their children, it was me take me let it be me who bears the punishment, and in such cases Ben will glance at the waiting, watching mirror for a word of comfort or absolution that does not come. 

Instead he must bow his head down beside theirs on the table and speak the words himself, whatever his own words are worth; Ben supposes they are worth more than they used to be. 

“Now sit up,” he finishes. “There’s no need for that here.”

One admiral in particular keeps silent, unmoving and unblinking the whole while Ben is speaking, until the very end when he stands to be led away and reels back to spit in Ben’s face; a guard rams his stun-prod against the man’s neck and drops him flat with a jolt.

“I don’t see why we’ve all got to be so crude.” The guard lets the prod’s trigger go. “You okay?”

Ben is wiping his face on the collar of his shirt and blinks to realize he has just been addressed.

“Yes.”

On certain mornings he also goes down into a chilled morgue the size of a starship hangar, draws back wax-coated white sheets from faces or the remnants of faces and studies each one before covering it again to write down a name with immaculate penmanship on a blank card that dangles off the corpse’s wrist. In absence of a name he will record a number, so that the list of casualties eventually comes to resemble a cipher with no plaintext to give it meaning: JT-7801, SK-1893, TS-1630, FN-2188.

Ben allows himself to be escorted back to his cell every evening and sits against the wall, his head on his knees and a pain as sharp-fanged as remorse in his right leg where the bones have not finished knitting back together and will be permanently crooked when they do; Dad, he thinks, as he often does, Dad, I know I have to do this, and you believed I have the strength to do it, but Dad it is so much. It is so hard. 

He is still sitting this way when Rey appears, as sudden and solid as though conjured from behind a veil. She kneels to take his face in her hands. 

“You’re only one person, Ben.”

Ben reaches up to lace their fingers together, although it still seems such a strange, wondrous thing that he is able to do it. 

“So are you.”

She smiles. 

“I’d say that makes us a good pair, then, doesn’t it?”

She is never far from the reach of his mind, a universal constant even if the bond itself alters almost daily its character: she is the second encircling arm on a mapmaker’s compass, the quicksilver fish making blithe, quarrelsome tugs on a line, the doubled sun of a parhelion caused by light reflected off the ice-crystal air of a winter day. Ben becomes quickly accustomed to her nudges against his thoughts, which are like interrogative taps on his shoulder, although he doubts he will ever be able to perfectly anticipate the absurd things she is going to say when he turns to hear them. 

“What’s that bird called,” Rey asks, seated on a bench in the Senate House’s courtyard, “the one with the beak shaped like a star? There’s a tintolive tree here that’s got a little nest in it made from twigs and ribbon.” 

“That’s a bula,” Ben answers, cross-legged on his bed. “Chewie hates them. Don’t let it near your hair.”

“Are they any good for eating?”

“Ask Chewie.” 

“How do you make a braid?” she asks, squinting at her distended reflection in a cereal bowl at breakfast. “I never learned. Do I start with the center strand over the right, or the left under the center?”

“Right over center.” Ben lifts a lock of his own hair to direct the muddled course of her hands. “Unless there’s an Alderaanian nobleman you’re hoping to insult. Starting with the left strand will tell him something different.”

“How different? Is there a braid I could use to tell someone I think they’re a stampeding moron who couldn’t tell a writ from a womp-rat’s ass? I know that’s an unusually specific requirement.”

“In politics? Hardly.”

“Did you ever have your own starship?” she asks, repairing a piston rod in the Falcon’s sublight engine. 

“One,” Ben answers, crouched beside her from a world away to observe her as she works. They have already had their stalemate argument about bypassing the compressor. “It was a modified black YT-1760 small transport. I named it the Grimtaash —don’t laugh.”

“I’m not.” Rey tucks her face against her arm to hide the smile. “What does it mean?”

“It was an Alderaanian story they told to children.” Ben pulls at his knuckles. “The Grimtaash was a Molator who protected the royal family.”

“From what?”

His mouth jerks to one side. “Betrayal.”

She reaches out to touch him, and when the bond shutters closed there is a smudge of black oil on Ben’s cheek. 

“What flavor is this?” she asks, skimming a finger through the whipped cream atop a snow-cake; she whirls and puts it tenderly but rather indiscreetly in Ben’s mouth when he opens it to inform her. He must swallow several times to avoid choking on his surprise. 

“Lemon,” he answers, in a flat voice. 

Rey serves herself another dollop and grins at him.

“It’s good.” 

They slap food trays to him through a ten-inch slot in the wall and Ben eats his meals seated on the floor, saving the vacuum-sealed cups of diced fruit for Rey and examining his present dilemma. It is a haze of indirection that turns his impending trial, made concrete by the irretrievable reality of his deeds and containable by his complete inquisitor’s knowledge of them, into a seemingly trivial matter by comparison; the woman he shares a soul with longs for something from him – she glories, absurdly, in thoughts of his mouth, his chest, his various scars, the bow of his back, the mere quantifiable size and heaviness of his body, which he has always regarded with the tolerance one feels toward a lumbering but useful beast of burden — and Ben’s experience in this particular direction was truncated at age ten by his admission into a celibate religious military order headed by his maternal uncle. 

It is certainly a conundrum.

He has contemplated the act with her, true, in the hypothetical and fantastical way he once dreamed of growing wings as a child, but the immediate possibility of it sends him reeling into something like a panic. 

For instance, Ben is entirely uncertain of the protocol surrounding what he should say immediately before and after, if he is supposed to say anything. He does not know if he will be expected to have bathed, to have brought towels for covering the bedsheets, if the act is best done in a bed at all or if beds are chosen merely for their preponderance of availability. He does not know whether he should lie on top of her or under her, does not understand the nuanced implications each respective choice might carry or if there are other spatial arrangements at which his stunted imagination has not even guessed. Suppose she dislikes it, suppose he does the wrong thing, suppose she is disappointed by the truth of him after having gathered so much incandescent, arrested energy in her expectation, suppose he hurts her. Suppose he has to sneeze.

She wants him for himself, wants him as Ben, but then again she started wanting him as Ben when he had that long dashing black cloak and those tall striding black boots; Ben is more dubious of his seductive capacities as a cripple wearing a set of black prison scrubs that are too short for him at the ankles — just enough to show an edge of the old fractal lightning scars on his legs; he has tried to hide these from Rey and she went as silent as a knife-point upon first seeing them — and one who in addition still spends half his days feeling as though he wants to cry. Expelling the voices from his head, whom Ben must now name singularly as Palpatine, had apparently not set this matter entirely to rights, any more than it had released him from the consuming, capricious rushes of cold rage, except now there is no mask to detach him from its brutalizing consequences and no direct object he can turn the rage upon but himself. He has lived almost thirty-one years inside a body he never fully possessed, within a mind disfigured and desecrated by a man whose indifferent hatred of him had reached from beyond death to see and know and shape him from the time that he lay dreaming beneath his mother’s heart. 

A column of nausea rises in his throat. 

Ben gulps it down and snaps his white plasticine spoon into pieces as a distraction. He folds these fragments up in a brown napkin and sets it tidily on his food tray; he remembers to rest his fork and knife side by side on the half-empty plate, as he had once been taught by Threpio to do at Senate dinners, and swipes the extra pepper packets for Rey before sliding his tray back through the wall. 

He lies atop the starched bedclothes and folds his hands across his chest; he wakes in darkness several hours later to a borrowed barb of rage in his heart and a borrowed slick of sweat between his shoulderblades. 

Ben lights to his bare feet and in three weightless steps is standing in the moonshine of Rey’s quarters.

Her bed has been pushed to the wall. The room’s contents are stacked atop or beside it — the pressboard wardrobe, the desk, the rug, a spike of blueblossoms in a soda bottle — to leave a wide, cool space on the tiled floor. Rey stands drawing arabesques through the air with a practice saber, its blunt blade humming at each change in direction. Her anger lends a savage originality to the motions; Ben keeps his hands behind his back and his back against the locked door he has just walked through. 

Rey arches one foot when she turns into a long-tail guard position. Her hair has been braided with the left strand worked under the middle. 

“Oh.” She trails her sword around into a low center guard, rested on its point to mete out quick parries. “Hi. I forgot how late it was.”

“You’ve been speaking with the chancellor again.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve already exhausted my curse lexicon for the day.” Rey huffs a string of hair off her face. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Ben pushes away from the door. “And let me miss the fun?”

His hand is already outstretched when Rey sends a second practice saber winging to him; Ben catches it and steps into a hanging-point guard.

From the beginning, when she was armed only with a blaster whose safety she nearly forgot to switch off, Rey has always fought in these same eruptions of swift, vital ferocity. They exploit every opening and follow no dictates of style, form, aesthetic or code, and on Starkiller Ben had understood that if they were by chance to both lose their weapons she would simply fall upon him with fists and feet; he has thrown enough madcap right-hooks at his opponents to know the look. 

“Did you teach yourself all this?”

Their sabers spring three times off one another. Rey changes the order of her hands along the hilt and cuts her saber upward. Ben diverts it in a spiraling counterstroke.

“What, with the sword?” Rey asks.

“With anything.”

“Something like that — the first time I ever punched anybody, I didn’t even know enough to keep my thumb on the outside.” Their swords meet again; their swords leap part. “I had to wrap it in sticks and yarn for six weeks until the sprain went away.”

“How old were you?”

“I can’t remember. Seven? He’d been trying to filch from my scrap haul. When I saw the punch hadn’t worked I just kicked him between the legs. That was one benefit to being smaller than everyone else, at least.”

She flips the saber so its hilt faces front, making the blade into a dagger she scythes around in a backwards arc. The maneuver startles him so much it is only on instinct Ben manages to bend backwards under it; he comes up and shoves the hair from his eyes. 

“You learned the reverse Shien grip from a thug on Jakku?” 

“No, I got that one out of a book from the Ahch-To temple. They don’t do a very good job at explaining the forms, though.” 

“Those books don’t explain much of anything. The true way of a Jedi is to make simple things sound as complex as possible so everyone’s afraid to ask questions.”

“‘Obfuscating bantha-shit,’ I think you called it.”

Ben ducks around to catch her next blow against another hanging-guard across his back. It gives him time to smile before straightening again. 

“You read my annotations.”

“‘Periphrastic evasion of underlying theoretical contradictions,’” Rey says, in a droll bass voice. “Inexcusable use of the undistributed middle fallacy.’ ‘Get to the point already, you decrepit pickle-brained gasbag.’”

“I was thirteen when I wrote most of those. Luke wasn’t thrilled by the commentary.”

“Wasn’t he? I thought they were the best part.”

Ben moves the saber in flaunting loops between his hands as he circles her. The dragging limp in his right leg can be made into something like a swagger if he does it at the proper pace. “You didn’t learn to read from the thugs on Jakku, either.”

“Old ship logs from the Rebellion – that and scavenging around on the star destroyers.” Rey follows his pacing and flits her blade, back and forth, prospective as the tail of a crouched leopard. “I can’t believe it took me so long to figure out how you could take the letters in ‘garbage chute’ to make new words from.”

“Is there anything you haven’t had to teach yourself?”

“Yes —I stole this trick from you.”

Rey pirouettes to put herself inside his defenses and grabs the wrist on his sword-arm. Ben snatches her wrist in answer and finds himself pinned against the wall of his cell, Rey’s breathing coming shallow and fast through the dark. Her knee brushes the inside of his thigh; Ben hefts around to spraddle her backwards across the desk in her quarters, moonshine limning his arms and her face a silver-white. Her shirt has slipped open and shows a flat expanse of freckled, sunburnt skin above her breasts.

Rey lifts her eyes. Their breathing makes the air between them thick and sultry. 

“Why didn’t you bring your saber?”

His ears are ringing. All the blood has drained from his head. “My what?”

“On Exegol. You didn’t bring your lightsaber — you ran in to face Palpatine and the Knights armed with nothing but a single-barrel blaster.”

“Yes.”

“Really? That was your whole plan?” 

“Give or take a few details.”

“What were you thinking?”

“Mostly of you.”

Rey lifts her head with a proud jut of her jaw to kiss him. 

The sabers drop in a clatter. Rey twines her legs around his waist while Ben hitches his hips to seat her on the desk, hoping he will not do something abysmal like drop her or lean too much weight on that hindered right leg. Rey kisses him again; the kisses he gives her back in greedy, desperate succession have the texture of a briary red wine. Rey holds him closer with those birch-strong arms and legs to reach down his sides, her delicate fingers fumbling over his ribs, and Ben realizes in a heady rush that she is searching for the tie belting his shirt closed. 

There is a sheen of sweat on his chest. It wicks the shirt to his skin and dampens Rey’s clothes, where he is pressed against her, and Ben’s whole mind pauses to balance over this single thought: that he should be touching her this way, this body so clean-lined and lovely and treasured, that he should ever want to foul it with whatever inward corruption has allowed him to do the things he has done and has invited the things that have been done to him in kind.

I’m not giving you anything, Rey had said. 

We’ll see, Ben had answered, and he had been with her inside all the pain that followed, just as she had been with him inside the pain as Ben watched his father die transfixed upon the cross-guard sword of his own immolating self-deception. 

His whole body contracts in revulsion. 

“Stop.” His voice is strangled in his throat. “Stop.”

Rey’s hand withdraws as though from a hot stove. Their limbs disentangle. Ben lets her go and is flung backwards to find himself alone in his cell again, his face in his hands as a black, swallowing surf bashes against his eardrums and skull. His right leg has collapsed beneath him like a jack-stand to deposit him on the rigid bed and he sees no reason to stand, so he rolls onto his side and folds his knees against his chest to keep himself from being sick. 

The atmosphere ripples and then Rey is at his side; she hangs above him, waiting. The soft edge of her robe trails against his skin.

Ben keeps his darkening hands over his eyes. 

He had lived the whole year following the battle on Crait under the same pall of composure a man sometimes feels with his neck in the noose, interspersed by those same lashes of tempting, tormenting hesitation; I wish I had made her stay. I wish I had offered her more, although I offered her the galaxy because I had nothing else, I had no greater gift to give her. I wish she had understood this was the only way things could be. I wish she felt for me as I feel for her, and failing in that I wish I could hate her as she hates me, I wish I could hate her as perfectly and as devotedly as I have always, always hated myself. I wish I had gone to my father, I wish I had let Luke kill me, I wish my mother had told me the truth of who I was and why she was so afraid of who I would become. I wish Snoke had never found me. I wish I had been born a different person. I wish I had not been born at all. 

But he had been born, as himself; and now his master is dead, his teacher is dead, his mother is dead, his father is dead, and he, Ben Solo, is alive. 

Rey lies down next to him. 

When Ben does not flinch away she works her arms around him from behind; after another long moment she presses her face against the broad plane of his back and puts an ear to the cavernous noise of breathing in his chest. 

Ben exhales. It shakes him at the end. 

“I’ve been trying to think,” he says. “I still don’t know how much of me is myself and how much is what he meant me to be.” 

Her desire goes on radiating from her and through her, illuminating her like sunlight through mist in his higher senses, but her hands stray no further than to rest over his stuttering heart. 

“You saved me, Ben.”

He nods. 

“Why?”

He pauses, even if the answer comes to him with the same instantaneity of grace as it had come to him that first time, going to her on his hands and knees. Her whole life had seemed to unfurl before him: Rey who belonged to herself, Rey through all the sorrows and joys and losses and victories that yet awaited her, Rey amidst the stars and the seas and all the green, thriving things of the galaxy, and perhaps there would be certain moments in the years and years and years to come when within the canticles of her stillness and her perfect peace she would pause to remember him — he would be with her, he would be with her if she did — and as Ben took her muted body in his arms this knowledge had been enough. It had been everything. 

“What else could I have done?” he asks. 

Rey shifts to murmur in his ear. “He didn’t have anything to do with that, you know. That was you.” 

He nods again.

“It was always you, Ben,” she says. “When I touched your hand that first time, I only saw you.”

“Yes.” He crosses his arms over his chest to cover her hands with his. He can fit her fists neatly and completely into his palms, like pearls cupped inside their shells. “You did.” 

They stay wrapped around one another this way, and when Ben wakes from a deep, dreamless sleep he finds the warm weight of her body has left its vague impression on the rumpled sheets. He curls up within it and does not move until all the lights come on again. 

…

The terrace is made from a pale marbled stone and shaded by an arbor laden with fragrant white flowers grown in clusters. It overlooks a pond full of pink lotuses and dragonflies; quick black water makes the reflected sunlight crimp across Ben’s face as he sits waiting at the terrace’s lone table. 

They are still within the prison compound’s sprawling grounds and a copse of evergreen oaks beyond the lawn conceals a southwestern cell block built to accommodate two thousand inmates. Ben’s wrists are shackled but he has obtained permission to wear civilian dress for this encounter; Rey has presumed until now that his belted tunic was black, held shut at the throat by a silver hook, but now the sunshine discovers blue and silver threads glinting from within the brocaded fabric. 

Rose walks the three steps down to the terrace like a disembarking voyager and goes to meet him. 

Rey does not follow her; neither does Finn, who has planted himself on the warm afternoon stone to watch whatever will happen next. 

Ben looks up from his bound hands only when Rose has reached the table and stands staring at him. She grips the back of a second chair but remains on her feet; Ben waits, waits longer without breaking her gaze, and after two false starts he opens his mouth. 

“Did you really bite General Hux,” he begins, “or was that just his usual histrionic whining?”

Rose has her back towards Rey and Finn but they both see her pull her shoulders taller, as though she is preparing to take a running leap across a long fall. Her hands tighten and relax around the chair’s iron spindles. 

“If he didn’t want me to bite him, he shouldn’t have stuck his fingers in my face.” 

“Yes, I told him the same thing.” 

There is another beat. Finn draws a breath Rey does not hear him release; his whole body is tensed forward. He has left his blaster in the prison’s front receiving station, as per standard protocol, but Rose’s electrical shock-rod is stuck in his back pocket.

Rose scrapes the second chair out from the table to sit.

“So I guess you already know who I am, huh?”

“I do,” Ben says. “Your sister was the gunner who destroyed our siege dreadnought at D’Qar. We lost two hundred thousand troops and officers that day.” His eyes are keen in their sorrow and penetrating in their recognition. “And you lost her.”

Rose reaches up to clasp something hung around her neck, though it is hidden from sight by her buttoned shirt.

“Yeah.”

“Will you tell me her name?”

The wind shakes down a spray of white flowers and both Ben and Rose begin to speak more quietly, so that Rey cannot hear them without straining like a busybody. She sits down on the steps beside Finn, elbows on her knees and face in her hands; Ben drops his eyes again, sets both cuffed hands on the table where Rose can see them and does not move, otherwise, despite looking so cramped in that dainty filigree chair and with his right foot hooked around his left ankle to keep them both from twitching. Rey is still trying to understand how his eyes can alter so quickly between the gloomy stoicism and the wry mischief and the devastated wisdom, all of it set beneath that moral courage he wears like a crown. 

She has spent the past four weeks reading through the penal codes from five different systems, on twenty different planets, searching for whatever exception or clause or loophole she needs to set him free. She has collected character statements from prison guards and medbay nurses, visited the Unknown Region’s colonies and picked through the rubble of burned-over planets, drafted intricate if politically naive plans for dismantlement of the First Order and the formation of a new Jedi temple, plans in which Ben Skywalker Organa Solo is instrumental, essential, crucial indispensable and a lot of other pretentious synonyms Rey has pilfered from old books that cannot help her and borrowed from old laws that do not care about her. 

When she cries, abrupt and with the abandonment of a thundershower in her frustration, it is always with her thoughts locked against him, so that Ben will not see her or hear her and feel he is somehow the cause.

In the end, Ben always comes to her anyhow. 

I’m free already, he speaks into her mind. I’ve been free since the moment I realized what my father was trying to tell me, I’ve been free since the moment you told me you wanted to take my hand, and then there will be a touch against her eyelashes like falling snow as he kisses her within that liminal, inmost place between their souls. 

It’s all right, he will say. Don’t be afraid. 

Rey must also lock her mind against him whenever she is reading those silly data-magazines she keeps stashed far, far under her bed, which are about as unhelpful as the penal codes but twice as blisteringly incomprehensible. 

_TEN MOVES THAT WILL BLOW HIS POWER-CONVERTERS_ , the article titles vouchsafe. _FIFTEEN TRICKS TO FIRE HIS SPEEDERS: NOW INTERSPECIES RELATIONSHIP-FRIENDLY – BONUS QUIZ INSIDE. TWENTY WAYS TO MAKE YOUR MAN FEEL LIKE A PRINCE_. 

The articles all seem to take a certain prerequisite level of expertise on the man’s part as a foregone conclusion and call for so much slapping, pulling, yanking and biting that Rey is not uncertain their advice would be misplaced in the steps for tenderizing a plucked bloggin-bird. She has not touched Ben anywhere except on his face and hands since that night in her quarters; she had felt the same contraction of violating self-disgust, as it passed through his mind and body into hers, but has no word or analog into which she can fit it.

“So what are the rules supposed to be?” Finn asks. 

Rey sits up. Finn is still so new to his powers that half the time she cannot detect his signature in the Force at all, feels it instead as a diffusing warm around him, but her brain slams down like an iron siege-gate anyway as a precaution. 

“Rules for what?”

“This whole bit about being a mind-reading space wizard.” Finn does not take his eyes from Rose; he follows each smallest gesture, the way she jinks her foot or swivels her wrist. Something she says causes Ben to shake his head. “Am I supposed to try and see what she’s thinking, or is that off-limits?” 

“Can’t you just ask her?”

“Yes. No.” Finn drags at his face. “I really screwed things up, didn’t I?”

“Maybe.” Rey pulls a blue-gray thread from the sleeve of her robe and twists it off. She has been studying Finn and Rose from the corner of her eye for a year, pondering the unspoken exchanges that have made the distance between them seem to vacillate and change its shape like the iridescent air inside a soap bubble. “Why?” 

He listens to Rose‘s indistinct voice; his face tightens. 

“She almost got herself killed, Rey. Trying to stop me from doing something stupid — she could’ve died, and it would’ve been for me.” He leans sideways toward her. His eyes shift almost imperceptibly from Rose to Ben. “How do you pay back a person who’s willing to do something like that for you?”

“That’s not why she did it, Finn.”

“No.” He leans away again. “That’s the part that scares me most.”

“Yes,” Rey says. “It scares me, too.”

They sit side by side on the steps for perhaps ten minutes longer. Rey takes the blue thread she has yanked from her sleeve and winds it around the second-tallest finger on her left hand. 

At night, when everything grows largest and closest, Rey will shut her eyes and try to remember anything, anything about her father’s face, her mother’s face, those nameless, placeless people who sold her into servitude to keep her from the truth and now link her with the man who destroyed Ben’s family and Ben’s life, except she has tried this trick so often that the disparate imagined pieces will tilt like the colors inside a kaleidoscope but show her nothing. 

What Rey will see instead, when the colors at last resolve, is herself, holding the saber-staff made from a light like a beautiful, dying red star. 

“You know,” Rey has said, “I guess it’s sort of funny — in the end, I still don’t know who I am.” 

“You’re yourself,” Ben has told her. “That should answer for the rest.”

Rey looks down at the thread around her finger and lets it unravel. On the terrace Ben turns his head to glance across the pond; sunlight draws out the dignity and clarity of his profile above the starfield-black of his clothes. 

He has fought this same battle his whole life, Rey knows, has fought it alone, and he has never once asked for the light or the darkness within her as two divisible parts. What he has asked for — you need a teacher, he had said; I want you to join me, he had said; you can’t go back, he had said, like I can’t — is her, in her complete and personal entirety. She had raised the lightsaber to make the final, irrevocable sacrifice to her own despair, at the foot of the empty throne, and there instead of Palpatine before her had been Ben, looking at her and seeing her and nodding his promise to her. 

When Rose stands to leave her eyes are red from weeping, but coming up the terrace steps she catches Rey into a hard hug; Rey hugs her back so fiercely it hoists Rose onto her toes.

Finn puts an arm around her as they leave, and just before they turn a corner off the terrace Rey watches Finn pluck down a white flower stuck in Rose’s hair. He holds it beneath her nose, first, to smell it, and then holds it under his.

The petals brush his lips. 

Rey takes the emptied seat and waits there across from Ben, who is studying his palms. The peace that has settled around him is like the lucid stillness of a sunrise and his eyes are red-lined around their edges as well. 

“I told you she wouldn’t hate you,” Rey says.

“You were right.” 

Wind shifts the lotuses on the pond and stirs the deep waters below. Rey watches Ben’s face and looks away, in deference to whatever private and hallowed things are happening within that private, hallowed soul of his.

He stands to go. She stands with him and puts a hand against his back; he has disciplined himself to all but conceal the right-pulling limp with an upright, sovereign gait she checks her steps to keep pace with. They are riding upwards to his cell block in an elevator together, the lights fluttering and changing around them, when Rey draws closer against him. 

Ben rests his face atop her head and breathes the scent of her hair. 

Then the elevator’s number changes, one final time, and at the last possible moment Rey also hooks two fingers under his belt to give it a taunting, teasing yank. The words she speaks into his mind are stated with a haughty possessiveness she sends all through his body so that he feels it in his toes. 

Mine, she says. 

Mine, mine and perfect because it is mine, perfect and mine because it is yours, yours, all yours, because it is you. 

The elevator grinds to a halt. 

Ben turns, looping his manacled hands around the back of Rey’s head so he can haul her up to kiss her; Rey replies by cocking her head and putting her mouth to his neck, with pout and push and a tantalization of teeth as though she is biting into a plum. 

Ben startles back a little. The doors smack open and he lifts his hands over her head again. 

Rey stands there with her clothes skewed and her hair jackstrawed across the top; Ben stands there with wide eyes and a scarlet mark against the white of his throat, breathing hard, and just before the elevator doors glide shut Rey winks at him.

From the other side of the alusteel between them, Ben laughs. 

…

“Diplomatic immunity,” Rey suggests. “You’re a prince of Alderaan, aren’t you? Your mother was the heir of House Organa. They can’t execute or exile a prince.”

They are seated at a table in the prison’s starkly-lit archival library; their feet are bare, shoes and boots tucked under their chairs, and every so often Rey will swing out a leg to curl her toes coquettishly against him. His final sentencing is scheduled to take place in eight days. 

She sits up late each night reading, scheming, talking in those elliptical orbits that must swing around the gravitational mass of the impartial bureaucracy they have found themselves caught within. Ben assists by citing statutes and ordinances and constitutional amendments from memory; he answers her questions with the excruciatingly polite evasion of someone who has skipped ahead several chapters and already knows how a story is going to end. They pause in the midst of these disquisitions to share the fruit-cups Ben has saved for her.

Ben stares at the elegant curls of hair beside Rey’s ears. They frame the broad, resolute bones of her face and drift whenever she moves her head. 

“There is no Alderaan anymore,” he says. 

“A government isn’t a planet. It’s a system that sticks a bunch of people together and lets them pretend they’ve got something in common until they believe it for themselves. I’ll bet there’s still Alderaanians all over the galaxy.” 

“I’d have to be an Alderaanian myself, first. I forfeited my citizenship when I joined the Order.”

“You’re a prince by blood, not adoption.” She wriggles her hips as though readying to saddle astride a new tactic and see if it can buck her off. “That isn’t the sort of thing you lose on a technicality —we both know how that works.”

“I don’t think the Senate would take kindly to my claiming a privilege of exemption granted to me by a planet the Empire destroyed.”

She gets up and goes around the bowlegged table to stand beside him. She shows him another page from her scrawling notes, its margins covered in drawings and thumbnail caricatures. 

“But you’re a Jedi too, remember. And I’m a Jedi. We’re supposed to get our own autonomous council. There’s only the two of us, so we’ll decide it between ourselves with an internal trial and the Senate won’t be able to say a word.”

“A gathering of the High Council requires twelve members to make a ruling legitimate. We’d need ten more Masters to even meet the quorum.”

“You can use an alibi.” She nudges her hip against him. “We’ll say you were with me.”

“The whole time?”

“I’m your dyad in the Force, Ben Skywalker Organa Itchy Solo. I’ve always been with you — let’s see some stupid pettifogger try to argue that one with logic.” 

Ben’s hand strays up to clasp her thigh. “I was ten years old when you were born, Rey. That’s a long time to account for.” 

“Idolian fever,” she proposes, unflagging. “We’ll pretend you’ve caught Idolian fever and when they’re transporting you into quarantine I’ll disguise myself as the maid and club the guards senseless with a toilet seat.” Ben stares at her with what must be senile perplexity; Rey pats his shoulder in soothing consolation. “Just like Lady Elsapeth did for Darius.” 

“That —” she has said this with such relentless conviction Ben must pause to remember a relevant passage from Ronton’s Second Anthology of Literature “— isn’t how that story ends.”

“Well, that’s what happened in my copy. It might’ve been missing the last twenty pages, but I know for a fact that’s what happened. Anything else would be stupid.”

Ben is the one who laughs, now, a gawky chuckle amidst the taciturn bookshelves; he muffles it by wrapping his arms about her waist and hiding his face between her breasts. 

Rey kisses the crown of his head, stroking her fingers through the hair he keeps brushed around his ears, and as she does this Ben sees it flare through her mind as a settled, unswerving fact that if nothing else works, come the day and the hour and the moment of decision, she is going to save him by simply killing anyone who gets in her way. 

Ben pulls back. 

“Rey.”

“I already told you.” She tilts his head up. He can see the splintered greens and browns in her eyes and remembers waking to life again on Exegol with her tears on his face. “Nobody’s going to take you from me.” 

“Your home is here, Rey.” 

“You are my home, Ben Solo.” She does not let him go. “I need you to understand that. Tell me you understand that.” 

He exhales as though the wind has been knocked out of him. He must control the quavering in his mouth before he can shape the words. 

“I do. I do.”

That night he dreams he is sitting on his father’s lap and together they are sitting in the cockpit of the Falcon. Ben must be very young, here, because his legs do not stretch beyond his father’s knees, and he can take the lapels on his father’s faded jacket to fold them closed around himself. The sky beyond the port-view window blazes bright with stars and constellations and Ben’s whole life is written into them, but he has forgotten their language and is trying hard to recall it. 

Which way, kid? Han asks. The ship’s hyperspace compass adjusts three degrees, holding its course towards the galaxy’s center. Which way should we go? 

Ben reaches out with a small, clean hand to point them forward. 

The images transpose, effortless as a coin changing its place under the three matching cups in a game of thimblerig, and then Ben’s body is the big, sheltering one in the pilot’s seat; the child in his lap has pitcher-handle ears and a head of curly dark hair. The boy’s little hand is still outstretched towards the horizon. 

That way, his son says. That way. 

Ben comes awake with a flinch. He slides from bed to bow his face against the stone. 

He has prayed all his life, to one whispering voice or another, through his anger and sorrow and long into even the bitter, evil hours of his failing faith, but this is perhaps the first time he has done it without any expectation whatsoever of a reply. 

He does it regardless.

Help me, Ben thinks. Help there be a way. I would die for her again, if it was asked of me, if it was required, but that is not what she wants; she wants my life, all of it, and I will give her that again as well if I am permitted. 

Help me. Help me. Please, please help me.

After ten silent minutes Ben rises from the cold floor on aching knees and goes back to sleep; when he is still in a state of a half-waking he feels Rey beside him, the phantom weight of her head on his chest, and he collects her in his arms to hold her. 

And it is at this juncture in the Trial of Supreme Leader Ben Skywalker Organa Solo – as the Senate’s chief clerk will later record for posterity – that things get a little strange. 

The first senator appointed to the jury is a Rodian known principally for his strong anti-tarriff stances and his hobby of breeding exotic flowers in glass ward-cases, in addition to having a dead brother with the Resistance's Black Squadron. On the morning of the seventh day before the sentence is to be decided, the senator comes downstairs to find a man standing in his sunroom and admiring a white Ithorian rose under a polished bell jar. The man has long gray-brown hair gathered back at the top and the early daylight passes straight through his body. 

The senator drops his watering can; the apparition of Master Qui-Gon Jinn disappears.

The second jurist is a Pantoran senator who was driven from his home on Castilon when it was seized by the First Order; walking out one evening on the purple-flowered moors of Stalimur he reaches a crossroad and faces the right-forking way that will carry him home to find a shriveled green humanoid waiting for him there, leaned against the stone mile-marker, hunched over a walking stick and observing him through a pair of shrewd eyes.

The Pantoran stops; Master Yoda turns and ambles away into the rolling twilight darkness. 

The third senator, an Umbaran whose predecessor died during the annihilation of Hosnian Prime, is traveling aboard a transport craft in the Otomok system and wakes from an uneasy slumber. A Togruta woman in brown robes occupies the seat beside her, which has been empty for the last two thousand miles and was empty until five minutes ago; the woman places their hands over one another on the armrest and smiles. A fourth senator, whose young daughter has suffered frightening and incomprehensible dreams all her life, turns abruptly from his shaving-mirror on Coruscant to face the man standing behind him, his sword the brilliant purple that divides the visible light spectrum from the ultraviolet. A fifth senator is toasting his glass of champagne, seated at a bar on Cantonica, and has read enough history — he is also the only member of the jury who was present for the signing of the Galactic Concordance — to know that the man he glimpses through its rising, gilded bubbles is Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, also called Ben. 

By the fourth day before the sentencing, the entire New Republic Senate seems to break out in a collective hive of dysfunctional confusion and hysterical terror. A thousand generations’ worth of faces stare out at them from pools of still water, from the facets within gemstones and the glass fruits of hanging chandeliers, from soup spoons and shadows and fog rising off the fields at dusk. At every angle of the Senate House’s stairwell, behind every half-opened door, people swear to seeing General Leia Organa clothed in a white mantle with a diadem of starlight on her brow. The eleventh juror, a Dathomiri senator tasked with overseeing reconstruction of the Unknown Regions, arrives in his office one morning to discover Master Luke Skywalker spinning a bronze armillary on the desk.

Master Skywalker halts the tilting spheres with a metal finger and blinks out of sight like a firefly. 

Half the Senate maintains that the jury foreman, the twelfth and last member chosen, must be an individual capable of absolute neutral equanimity, and must therefore hail from a planet of such remote inconsequence in the galaxy’s larger affairs that he effectively represents only himself; the other half of the Senate, their fleets in ruin and their soldiers lying dead, hold that he must be able to claim some true stake in the trial’s outcomes, that he must understand the vindictive, blood-baying sentiment of the people, although which people they mean is never made exactly clear. An unhappy compromise brings them to one very old senator by the name of San Bar Yishak, a human male with a long narrow beard that gives him the morose, righteous appearance of a goat; he is a member of the Church of the Force and comes from a backwater village called Tuanul, on an even more backwater planet called Jakku, and has a blaster-scar along his shorn gray scalp where a stormtrooper with the FN-corps failed to kill him a year ago on the direct orders of Kylo Ren. 

The day before the sentencing, he is standing at a window and looking out over the Senate House’s inner courtyard. The young Jedi woman sits there on a stone bench, alongside the man whose life they are to judge on the morrow. The woman is saying something to him; the man shakes his head, nods, shakes his head again and begins to cry, the sloppy and surrendering sort of cry most common in very young children. It crumples his face and makes his nose drip. 

The woman rests his head upon her shoulder and holds him fast in a rocking, cradling prayer. The man holds her as well. 

Yishak turns away. 

They have sent a new aide up to his office with a fresh pot of tea and a painted ceramic cup; she is an older woman in odd, rough-spun clothes who wears her brown hair in a classic imperial fashion, coiled into a braid at one side of her neck. Her silence is of the patient, vesper quality that tends to draw out incipient truths, and as she pours the tea Yishak lifts his head to her. 

“Punishing that man will gain the galaxy nothing,” he says. “It will teach him nothing.” 

She lifts the teapot in a graceful topping-off gesture. She listens. 

“It will not teach us anything, either,” Yishak continues. “The darkness that made him is one we all carry within ourselves. It is vanity to imagine it can be stamped out in a single act.”

He smells the floral steam rising off the tea and runs a hand over the scar on his scalp. The aide steps back to clasp her hands in diffidence, but her dark eyes shine gimlet-sharp as she looks at him. It draws out the fine creases in her face when she replies to a question he has not yet posed aloud. 

“What does your heart tell you?” 

He does not answer. She goes out several minutes later with a nod. Yishak hears the door close behind her and has walked back to his desk before noting that the aide has forgotten to bring up the day’s correspondence on his tea tray. He sticks his head out into the carpeted hall; a secretary at the outer table turns to him. 

“Yes, sir?” 

“Excuse me.” Yishak coughs. “But where is the woman who left here a moment ago?”

“What woman, sir?” the secretary frowns. “You’ve been alone in there all morning.”

Rey arrives at Ben’s cell before dawn on the morning of the final day and holds out a bowl of water for him while he washes his face and hands. She has brought a bundled selection of clothes for him, dyed the sumptuous colors of summer roses and evergreens and an agate brown she claims matches his eyes — remember, she tells him, you’re a prince — but in the end Ben goes out wearing his plain prisoner’s black and before he climbs the steps into the Senate House he pauses, unfathomably, to remove the shoes from his feet. The gold-plated gambler’s dice hang on a string tucked inside his shirt. 

They sit in a private room while the jury deliberates for six hours and are summoned to the great chamber shortly after noon. They go together out onto a suspended platform and as they stand there Rey takes Ben’s hand; her palm is cold but contains a building electrical energy that raises the hair on his arms. 

Don’t be afraid, he thinks, again. Don’t be afraid.

She lets him go. He steps forward. 

An anticipatory cringe passes through the Senate at this, as though they have been watching him disarm a live proton bomb and disconnect its final wire. Ben stares at the jury foreman — I know your face, I remember your face — when the man moves to stand before the chancellor. 

The foreman folds the paper on which a sentence has been written and turns to look down at Ben. 

“Kylo Ren,” the foreman says. “Ben Solo.”

Ben lifts his head. 

“We have entertained—” he pauses; there appears to be something at a far window that catches his attention “— extensive and unusual discussions, concerning you.”

“I’ve been told, sir.” 

“Yet in this endless and internecine talk, we have thus far failed to consult the man whom our proceedings and our judgement most concern. That man, of course, is you.”

“From a certain point of view.” 

“And you were a commander yourself once, were you not? Master of the Knights of Ren and Supreme Leader of the First Order — a man upon whose personal judgment a great deal depended, I would imagine.”

“I was. It did.”

“Then allow me to present a sort of theoretical dilemma for you, young Solo. It is of the same type as I believe my colleagues and I have been struggling with these past few days — I will ask you to tell us what you think.”

Rey clenches her fists. Ben nods. 

“There is a father,” the foreman begins, “with a son whom he loves.”

Ben’s heart stops as though pierced by a spear. 

“Yes,” he says. 

“And the son betrays his father. He turns his back on all he knows and breaks his father’s heart, as sons seem wont to do in this age and no doubt in all ages hence.” 

“Yes,” Ben says again. 

“And then, one day, after many years,” the foreman picks at the paper to smooth its creases, “the son comes home.”

“Yes,” he says, a final time. 

“But what happens, then? We are all of us sick and tired of war, Ben Solo, and so here is our moral problem — does the father turn him away? Does he ask that the son come begging in the dust at his feet? Does he cut off the offending hands that have done him so much wrong?” The silence hangs above them like a sword. “What does the father do, when he sees his son alive again?”

Ben closes his eyes, remembers both the great pit of red light and the narrow bridge that had carried him across it, and opens them. 

“He goes out to meet him,” Ben says. 

The foreman smiles and turns to present the chancellor with his paper. She unfolds it and scowls.

“That isn’t allowed, Senator Yishak,” she says. “This is highly irregular.”

“What about this trial has been regular, Chancellor? What about this man is regular?” 

She stares at him a moment longer, pallid and inscrutable, but stands to read what has been written.

“We the jury find this man Ben Solo guilty,” she pronounces, “and ask that his sentence be determined by the Jedi called Rey of Jakku, his dyad in the Force and therefore the proper appointed steward of his soul.”

The quiet that follows this is so utter it seems the whole room has stopped breathing. Ben looks back at Rey, still behind him, and every detail of the moment is articulated as though lit by a flash of lightning. Rey must see whatever she needs from him waiting there in his eyes, because she does not look into his mind before speaking. 

Ben nods to her anyway. She smiles. 

“The planets in the Mid Rim took the worst damage,” Rey says. “We’ll start our work from there.” 

The chancellor crosses her hands over one another. “The both of you?”

“I go where he goes.”

“Is that a condition or a demand, Master Rey?”

“Neither. That’s just the truth.”

The chancellor sighs. 

Something pulls on Ben’s perception. His gaze wanders up, up, up along the tiered amphitheater seats to the highest windows of the Senate House and stops short at the sight of a man who appears there. He has a mop of brown hair and wears dark red robes, a glove on his right hand, and there seems to be a fine-lined scar over his eye; he smiles and gives Ben something that very much resembles a thumbs-up.

Ben gives a circumspect thumbs-up in reply, since this seems the courteous next thing to do. The man fades away into the sunlight. 

“Very well,” the chancellor says. “Then go in peace.” 

...

The first time — there are many firsts, but this happens to be one of them — is amidst the meadow-grasses and wildflowers of Takodana, with the sun-slashed pine boughs overhead and their clothes cast about in tempestuous, unashamed disarray amidst the twisted roots and dappling shadows. They have spent the night talking over maps and blockaded trade routes with Maz Kanata in an upper chamber of the ruined castle; Maz has finished this negotiation by trouncing them both in a game of sabacc, besting Ben’s Straight Khyron hand with an Idiot’s Array and looking between him and Rey across the table. 

“I told you so, child.”

Rey does not bother toeing off both her shoes before she draws Ben down onto the coat he has outspread for her in the dawn-dewed grass. She spirits her hands across his skin, solemn in her consecrating attention as she memorizes the supple softness over the dense muscle that has always struck her as such a delicious luxury; he trails his mouth along the agile curves of her body, bowed above her as he kisses the pulses at her throat and wrists. Their murmurs purl their voices together like poured water, indistinguishable from one another, until Rey slides her palms along his back to find the small pearly scar at his side; there is a matching one just below his ribs. 

The nervousness makes her chest kick, but if the happabores can do this then kriff, so can they.

She reaches up to clutch his shoulders.

“Come here,” she says. “Come here.”

He rucks a trembling hand beneath her to lift her hips. His voice breaks. “Are you sure?”

Rey’s whole body feels like a struck chord of music and for an instant she is beyond herself, outside herself, and imagines she can hear the central, resonating harmonies that bridge all the imagined distances between their flesh and blood and souls. 

“Ben.”

He makes a stifled sound that is almost a laugh and gives himself over to her.

It stings a little, for a moment, and lasts about three minutes altogether — Ben speaks to her in some fluid, rapid language Rey does not understand— but he covers her with his whole yielding weight when it is finished to bury his wetted face against the crook of her neck. The tip of his nose is ticklish-cold.

She holds very still, her arms around him so that she can feel the rhythms of his breathing and his heart. She lifts a lock of his hair to expose one guileless ear; he holds very still as well and his mouth is warm on her skin when he kisses her again. 

He settles more deeply around her and Rey dandles a hand several times more along the curl of his ear, watches him shudder with contented pleasure, and here she pauses to think; she remembers her elbows sunken in a gravy pot of sudsy water.

“What did you call me, just now?” she asks. “I’ve read it somewhere before.”

Ben lifts his face off her neck. His face is red. “‘Turhaya.’”

“What’s that?”

“Old Corellian.” He hesitates. “‘Bright star.’”

“Oh.” She runs a finger along the place where his scar used to be. “Do you know the word for ‘love’?”

“Larel,” he offers. “Valle larel, Ben Solo.”

“Valle larel, Rey Solo,” she replies. “Does that sound about right?”

“No, you’ve—” his voice comes from higher within his chest in its restraint; he purses his lips “— you’ve got to get your tongue around it, more.”

“I don’t know if I can manage that.” She rolls him over and enthrones herself on his hips. “You’d better give me a demonstration.”

He does; Rey provides him with an imitative answer as further practice. They stay this way, trading words spoken and unspoken as the fragrant pine needles sparkle overhead.

They pick stray weeds from one another’s hair before finally standing to gather their clothes. Rey tosses his black pants like a lariat-loop to land them squarely around his shoulders; Ben yanks her white scarf up over her head and down over her eyes, snaps her into his arms and stomps back along the path they have traveled while she flails facetiously against him. It is a clear, still morning and their laughter carries far on the white-gold air, borne away by the forest’s valleys and hills and all of its dark and light places until the sound is everywhere. 

...

**Author's Note:**

> Valle larel = “Your love,” at least according to Wookiepedia.
> 
> Many thanks as always to my beta for the advice and guidance, and to everyone for reading.


End file.
